Smartphones get services

As Motorola enters the Windows-based smartphone business with its Q device, the company is trying to tackle delivering business-grade services to users via a mobile device

By Mary Branscombe, 13 Oct 2006 at 17:42

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Motorola chief executive Ed Zander wants to run his company from the palm of his hand - with a Motorola Q smartphone and the right set of services.

The Motorola Q is among the first Windows Mobile smartphones with a QWERTY keyboard rather than a numeric keypad, so it combines the phone-focused smartphone interface with something you can type a real email message on. This is turning into a popular form factor, with the Palm Treo 700 series, Samsung i320 and the HTC Excalibur taking the same approach.

In the US Motorola has already launched the Enterprise Edition of the Q with push email and a global address book lookup (a UK model with HSDPA connectivity is due this autumn). It also adds a larger battery because the original slimline version didn't last for long enough. That hasn't stopped them selling; Motorola shipped 150,000 units in the first 30 days.

One thousand of those went to Motorola itself, to equip employees. By the end of this year 5,000 Motorola employees will have a Q and access not just to email but to key business applications like SAP and to search results from the intranet as well as the Web. Ron Garriques, the president of the Mobile Devices business, uses his Q to make travel reservations, view the supply chain digital dashboard and track shipments of phones; "I haven't carried my laptop in four years".

This the tipping point for real business mobility, Ed Zander predicts. "Enterprises are going to go mobile the way they went PC. We're putting our internal apps on here, we're putting our company up on this thing." Zander has a slightly less bullish view of the Q but it's changed the way he works. "If I go to China for a week I'll take my PC because of attachments. If I go on a plane ride for ten hours I'd rather be typing on my computer than on this. But if I'm going away for a couple of days - this week I wasn't in my office Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I haven't been on the computer all week but I've done everything on here that will be important. You work smarter, maybe you have better decision making. And when I go home don't need to do 200 emails because I've done 100 of them on this. On the car ride home I can go through with a Q - I'm clicking delete, delete, delete or I'll see you tonight, I approve..."

It's ironic for a device that's connected nearly all the time it's turned on, but apart from the size, one main drawback of using a smartphone is what you don't have access to. You can read and edit Office documents, use line of business applications like SAP and search the web. However, a lot of the business information you need is in the documents on shares and servers around your company and you don't have easy access to those on the move.

If you're indexing with a Google enterprise search appliance, you can use the new version of Motorola's MOTOPRO Mobility Suite to create contextual search tools for the Q that retrieve information from your intranet. It can access ERP and CRM databases, email, spreadsheets and word processor documents and use metadata like where you are and what you're working on to get you the most relevant results.

The way John DeFeo, vice president of Motorola's Enterprise Products division sees it, the unified communications strategy the company is pursuing with Microsoft isn't just about getting you the information you need on the move - "on any device, using any access" - useful as that is. It's about extending the business processes to cover the way people work and the information they need to have to get things done.